--I'm thankful that no one is scheduled to come into my apartment in the next coming weeks so they can't see the piles of fabric, scraps, magazines, etc, that I have all over the floor trying to get things ready for the upcoming holidays. Correction...frantically trying to complete sewing projects in order to get them in the mail before the upcoming holidays. I'm not in the mood to clean up for guests.

--I'm thankful that I've made my last car payment three weeks ago and nothing tragic has happened to the car, now that is mine.. so far. Usually something tragic happens when I have free and clear money burning a hole in my purse. (Knock on wood!)

--I'm thankful for coffee and any caffeine products. 'Nuff said.

--I'm thankful that I have not had to shovel snow in twenty years. I see snow storms on the news and get the shivers because I know how that feels. With the northern California weather, all I have to say is "Suckers!"...until the next earthquake comes and rock our world.

--I'm thankful that I live alone now and never have to worry about whether the toilet seat is up or down. When you start aging, it's the little things...

--I'm thankful that I have a part-time job to go to 40 hours per pay period because if it wasn't for that I'll probably be in my jimmy-jammies 24/7 and only leave the house to buy groceries. Since all my hobbies are passive ...writing, reading, quilting, needlepointing...there would be no need to even shower most days. Talk about a stink-a-roo...

--I'm thankful that I woke up this morning, and every morning after this blog post (cross fingers).

--I'm thankful for Amazon. Now this may be an unusual thing to put on a blog but because of Amazon I'm able to get books, and other products that I can no longer find, to my house within a few days. Without Amazon, I would have never been able to publish my own books. I would have never met my beta readers through the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I would never have made improvements on my stories due of the betas' suggestions. I would never have been able to say, "I'm a published author. You can buy my work."

If I die in my paid-off car tomorrow because there was a freak snow storm in my city and I wrecked my car because I didn't have a morning cup of coffee as I was dressed and showered, driving to my part-time job, I could still say on my death bed..."I'm a published author."

We have so many things to be grateful for in our lives, but if you can accomplished just one thing in your under-lying dreams, the smile on your face every day shows people what a thankful person you are.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

I can’t help it. I’m fascinated by
GamerGate, yet I wimped out of blogging about it a few weeks ago. I figured there’d be plenty of bloggers going to town (and there are). Plus, not being a
gamer I figured I wasn’t really qualified to comment. But just imagine if
GamerGate was called BullyGate or MaleSupremacyGate instead. See what I mean?

Gamergate is such a cutesy name that even
the people confronting the issue head-on have a hard time not trivializing it. The moniker was a huge roadblock in my
attempts to write a serious blog on the topic. I'm beginning to think we need to stop assigning these ridiculous labels to everything. But in the world of Google keywords and Twitter character limitations, not to mention hashtags (don't get me started on hashtags), fat chance of that. Fat, fat chance. Like Biggest Loser Fat Chance.

Anyway, when I was done with my unpublished GamerGate blog, I realized I’d
basically advised all women to steer clear of the gaming industry because they’re
better than that. Smarter, too. Who wants to make a ton of money playing silly games when they
can toil away in legitimate businesses for half the pay? I mean actually
getting paid well to propagate one’s passion would put us on par with, say,
professional athletes. Before long, we’d be experiencing head trauma and
committing crimes including but not limited to abusing our significant others.
Okay, so we’d be millionaires, but is it worth the grief? It is not. That’s
what I told women in my blog. Far better to stay on the sidelines and wait for the male
riffraff to self-destruct. Eventually certain frontal brain areas will shrink
away to nothing—and we’ll be there, brains intact, to take over the universe.
Muhaahahaha. See, that’s my evil plot to take over the world. Wait till
everyone else dies off. Cool, huh?

Am I the only one who sees the resemblance?

Besides, we all know the gaming community
is a bunch of seedy guys wanking off in dark basements, right? Alternating
between their plastic joysticks and the flesh-toned one. No, no, that’s not
fair! I thought. (First off, in actuality a lot of modern game controllers are shaped vaguely like the female reproductive system.) A-ah! How can I be writing this stuff? It’s like my hand has gone
off on its own. Stop, hand! (Hey, maybe that’s how the gamers feel in their dark basements!)

I stopped typing then, and made an
earnest attempt to envision the subculture that might be behind GamerGate. (Pretty nice of me, seeing male gamers very rarely return the favor, according to this interview on Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.) This
time my mind supplied the crooks from Point
Break, the movie where Patrick Swayze spearheads a criminal band of surfers.
I don’t know if

it’s because they wear the masks of ex-presidents while robbing banks, the Nixon mask cementing the Watergate connection—at least the -gate part—or because the movie was directed by one of my film-making idols: Kathryn Bigelow, who happens to be a woman as well as a Kathryn (although I'm pretty sure she is not one of the Katherines in that John Green novel). Maybe it's because they were surfers, widely recognized as the notorious wave-riding slacker brothers to gamers. (Aw, fuck! I'm thinking skateboarders. Skateboarders are the land-dwelling parallels to surfers. And I had such high hopes for that allegory!) All I know is that the bad-guy group that Keanu Reeves infiltrates came up when I started scouring the ol' neuro-pathways in search of visuals for the cryptic GamerGate crowd.

My subsequent lapse in typing gave me opportunity to reread my previous document—and thank God I did before I posted
it. Through a furious blush, I sent the thing straight to virtual Timbuktu.
WTF, Jen? I admonished myself. You can’t pigeonhole men like that. You certainly
can’t tell the female youth of society NOT to game (Seriously, is that a verb?)
if that’s what they live for. After all the time you’ve spent in advertising,
you should know that gaming with the CDs and ACDs is the surest road to a quick
promotion. It fills a need.

I have a film background (which is why I’m
always going off on movie tangents). When I was in school I had a prof whom I
considered the personification of Evil. He was my Snape, in other words. But,
here’s the thing, deep down—in my collegiate naivete—I figured he had to have some core of goodness, seeing that he had
likewise chosen to study film. Had in fact devoted his life to it. Somewhere,
locked within that stony heart of his, was a love of movies, enough of one to keep said stony heart beating.

I’m not a gamer, but I imagine what draws
people to that particular pastime (or *shudder* career) is a deep belief that good must conquer evil. Gamers like to see this perpetuated over and over again (which they do instead of
getting honest work), right along with the stereotypes of women as slutpaper (slutty wallpaper, always in the background. How do you like them apples, all you professional moniker-makers?) Subject to mens' whims of either rescue or abuse. So, I appeal now to the gamers of the
world, including the gang from the Patrick Swayze/Keanu Reeves surfer movie that
if you dare to diss it, I’ll come after you with this little game controller I
like to call a taser (Repeat after me: The movie is a classic and Kathryn Bigelow is a pioneer. *runs off to picket the opening of the remake*). Let’s
all delve beneath our surfaces, straight into our nougat-ty centers, and remember
why we love video games in the first place. They give us the chance to be
heroes. Simple as that. United by that revelation, let’s not waste...er, finger muscles making nasty, anonymous threats to people.
Let’s not tie up the resources of law enforcement (if you want to support real
heroes, btw--not that you aren't real heroes in the darkness of your basement, I never meant to imply anything like that--you could always donate to your local police fund). Let's refrain from doxxing enemies (sounds way cooler than it is) and calling in
false crimes. In short, let’s end GamerGate for good. Or for the love of all that is holy, give it a less
cheesy name.

And for young women: Follow your hearts,
work where you choose, make better video games. Just remember, when all is said
and done, the ultimate object of the game—male or female, hobbit or wizard,
weird video game icon or other weird video game icon—is: Save Yourself.